I’m actually moving away from unsharp mask completely in favor of the new smart sharpen for my mask based photo retouching workflow.

Some people have been complaining (whining) about incremental upgrades for Adobe Photoshop not being anything special (and I’m betting they will still defend their iPhone/iPad upgrade tooth an nail), but I have to firmly disagree, especially regarding Photoshop CC.

The new tools are amazing and provide a much better overall workflow.

RHernandez — 8:38 AM on July 06, 2013

I don’t disagree that the new tools are “amazing”. What is amazing is the fact that Adobe has instituted a policy by where should any of their customers stop paying, they loose access to their files.

While I can kind of see what you were trying to get at with your iPhone comparison, the point is moot with the simple fact that you can choose to upgrade your phone when you see fit. Just like you used to be able to judge if a CS upgrade was worth it or not. A better comparison would be to compare purchasing or leasing cars. I prefer to have something at the end of the day rather than nothing…

Andrew Phang — 8:20 AM on July 07, 2013

RHernandez, if you read Roberto Blake’s post again carefully, I believe you’ll realize that you’ve misunderstood what he meant. He wasn’t talking about people whining about the new CC policies, but that people were whining about Photoshop’s past upgrades being lackluster.

How do you define "access"? If you stop paying Adobe, yes, you still have all your files. You can copy them; you can back them up; you can see them on your hard drive.

Can you do anything productive with them? No. If you have a perpetual version you'll probably be able to work with them to a degree — if you've saved them to be compatible with an earlier version. If you've subscribed to the Cloud as new customer, with no previous versions to fall back on, then you'll have to keep paying the subscription or you WILL lose "access" (as I define it) to your files.

Adobe has said they will address this issue and that they're "listening". But I'm beginning to suspect that they're waiting to see if they really HAVE to do something, or if enough new customers come to the Cloud that they can just ignore this issue.

Steve Drury — 10:51 AM on July 06, 2013

I have updated from CS6 to photoshop CC and I love the new Shake Reduction. this is a game changer, my question is why would I use smart sharpen when Shake Reduction works great. do i use both together?

Zorana Gee — 5:59 PM on July 09, 2013

Shake Reduction is to remove blur caused by subtle shaking of your camera. Smart Sharpen is about sharpening the existing pixels (2D blurs) – no analysis of image or how the blur happened. They do actually work quite well together. Start with Shake Reduction as it requires the most original data in order to fine the blur trace and then use Smart Sharpen.